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Sunday, January 15, 2012

I was contacted to feature a guest post. The following article came from my request for one on finding good makeup buys. Enjoy. LPV

Guest Post: This article was written by James Lander of couponing site, Couponing. The website is dedicated to sharing couponing tips, techniques and deals.

Humans have been painting their faces for as long as they’ve walked the earth. We’ve always been fascinated with temporarily altering our appearance – whether for spiritual, cultural or sexual reasons. As our society developed and modernized, women became the primary wearers of cosmetics and as a result, an extraordinarily lucrative industry has developed.

The Price of Powder and Potions

Taking into account that most girls start to wear makeup in their early pre-teens, the average woman will spend over 13,000 dollars on makeup in her lifetime. Cars can be bought for less. If you are attempting to live on a budget, you may be doubly shocked by the amount. You may have already let luxuries like department store or designer cosmetic brands fall to the wayside, but there’s no need to go barefaced in the meantime. You can still afford to wear your YSL lip-gloss; you just have to be a bit wily when it comes to acquiring it.

Be a Beauty Opportunist

Cosmetic companies and department stores make errors like the rest of us. After all, those in charge of buying and selling are human too. Their errors however, can be a budget-conscious beauty’s gain. Often times a company will either over-produce or over-order a product and be unable to move it in the stores. What results is a large amount of overstock that discount retailers descend upon and buy at very steep discounts. These outlets, such as TJ Maxx and The Cosmetic Company in America and Winners in Canada, sell these products at lower prices but nothing near the pittance they acquired them for. Of course, they are still making a considerable profit. Most women, however can disregard this discrepancy and enjoy the ability to use their favorite status moisturizer rather than stooping to drug store products.

Surf the Web Style-wise

The Internet is an excellent hunting ground for the hopelessly addicted. The small retailers and third party sellers working out of EBay and Amazon generally offer products with a discount of 30% or more. Whether this is because the designer lip-gloss was nicked off the back of a truck or snuck under someone’s raincoat, it really isn’t any of the consumer’s concern. Paying twenty dollars for a product that would have cost you fifty can go a long way in relieving any kind of third-degree guilt.

If buying from shady sellers doesn’t interest you, you might consider more reputable beauty discount sites such as Hautelook.com. This site is an absolute boon to the skint fashionista. Every day at 8am PST, the site posts luxury items for sale at 50% or more off the original price. In fact, the average discount a shopper can expect to enjoy is a whopping 75%. If you take the time to bookmark and check this site daily, you can easily acquire the kind of high-end cosmetics you lust after but might not be able to afford.

Time to Rely on the Kindness of Strangers

When it comes to shopping, there really is no better price than free. Being able to line your vanity table with top-notch brands without paying a dime might seem like a pipedream, but it’s not. Makeupalley.com is an extremely popular site where the beauty obsessed meet to share reviews of products, post in the forums and perhaps best of all, trade products. If you have a few incredibly pricey but ugly blushes in your makeup kit that you haven’t touched for years, you can post them in the swap forum and see who bites. Other women may be willing to trade a product that you are dying for but they themselves hate. All you need to pay for is postage. For less than a dollar you can trade all your cosmetic dust collectors for products that you honestly need.

You could analyze women’s obsessions with cosmetics to death and in the end you’ll probably come to the conclusion that it’s just something that girls like. Socio-cultural influences aside, the love of gorgeous things and feeling pretty may be just inherent for some women. There is no reason to abandon that joy simply because you are being more conscious with your spending. By sourcing out the cosmetic discounts in your area and online, you can enjoy being frugal, fabulous and perhaps best of all, clever.